Herbert de Souza - Brazil
interview with
Herbert de Souza
Social activist - Brazil
by Alex Shankland
New Internationalist magazine,
February 1995
'Brazil is Paradise for a minority, Purgatory
for most people and Hell for 20 per cent of the population.' Herbert
de Souza has a flair for language. Christian images are interspersed
with rhetoric, statistics and an unshakable moral determination
to ram home unpalatable truths. This mixture has made him the
leading analyst of Brazil's tortured history of 'development'.
In 1992 he burst out of the academic ghetto, sparking an extraordinary
national campaign against hunger and poverty. The crusade, known
officially by the cumbersome title 'Citizen's Action Against Poverty
and Hunger and for Life', is known unofficially as 'Betinho's
Campaign'.
De Souza, affectionately known as 'Betinho',
has become a kind of conscience for Brazil. Start a conversation
with him and you will find it littered with paradoxes. Some are
raised provocatively and then left hanging in the air. Others
are teased apart playfully by his formidable intellect.
One paradox overshadows them all. Betinho
tested HIV-positive in 1985 and AIDS has already killed his two
brothers. Yet he speaks of this apparent death sentence as 'liberating'
- infusing his own struggle for life and his war on social injustice
with an intense contagious optimism.
Betinho has a faith in people's ability
to change their minds. 'When I was a Maoist I believed power grew
from the barrel of a gun; later I realized that power really lies
in the growth of awareness.' For him Brazil is still largely trapped
in the legacy of a dictatorship which 'perverted the state, intimidated
the spirit of citizenship and destroyed society's self-confidence'.
But he himself has moved on from what he calls the 'period of
collective madness' - the 1960s and 1970s, when he was forced
underground and then into exile.
He rejects the criticism of left-wing
traditionalists that his campaign to collect food for 32 million
hungry Brazilians is simply 'papering over the cracks'. Instead
he stresses: 'I've learned much more during this campaign than
I did as a militant of the Left. Without the practice of change,
the rhetoric of change is meaningless.'
The hunger campaign is run out of the
offices of IBASE - the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic
Analysis - which is the non-governmental organization that de
Souza helped start up after his return from exile. But decentralization
is the key word for the campaign. Local committees are completely
independent and they emphasize rapid collection and distribution,
not strategic planning and accumulation. For as Betinho points
out, 'accumulation breeds inertia and corruption and hunger is
an emergency'.
Results have been impressive. The number
of local committees is now over 3,000 and it is estimated that
32 per cent of all Brazilians have donated food, money or clothing
to the drive. Donations have come from the most unlikely sources,
including the inmates of Rio's prisons.
Although Betinho's ideas are responsible
for the direction and momentum of the movement he declines the
title of Director in favor of National Articulator. Last year
he tried to shift the campaign's emphasis from food to jobs, a
difficult move. Hunger is one thing, he says. 'But how should
a committee set about creating jobs? Do jobs depend on government
and business only? Or can citizens contribute something too?'
He rejects out of hand the economic argument that job creation
requires huge investments.
'If that's what economic theory says,
then I say to hell with the theory,' he declares, with a hint
of mischief in his eyes. Economic theory is one of his favorite
targets. 'A beetle knows nothing about the laws of aerodynamics,
but it manages to fly perfectly well.' Betinho believes that economic
theory has taken over from nuclear war as one of the most dangerous
threats to the modern world. 'It is dragging humanity towards
the disaster of social apartheid,' he declares.
The change in the campaign focus from
hunger to unemployment marks a shift to addressing root causes
- 'for hunger: food; for poverty: work'. Next on Betinho's list
is land reform. The hungry in the cities, he notes, are overwhelmingly
landless migrants from rural areas. 'The origin of poverty in
Brazil is in the countryside.'
The 58-year-old, with his frail, stooped
frame, is a magnetic presence for TV cameras, a must in a TV-addicted
country like Brazil. His incisive delivery leaves an indelible
imprint on the mind of the listener. Brazil's history is full
of popular resistance expressed in bloody upsurges which met heroic
but inevitable defeat. Betinho's quiet survivor's heroism and
imperturbable ability to talk as 'Citizen Betinho' to any one
- from President to slum dweller- differs radically from the model
set by generations of dead rebels.
Brazil has a habit of projecting anyone
with media presence, from soccer heroes to game-show hosts, into
politics. But Betinho swears he won't join the rush. 'The really
fundamental changes come from below, from society,' he argues,
'and I wouldn't want to be a prisoner of a party line, of a single
set of arguments.' Ever the iconoclast, he grins mischievously
and adds: 'After all, I don't want to lose the element of surprise.
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Heroes
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